MOVING house is up there with the death of Smudge the cat and being burgled as among the most common causes of stress and depression.

Everyone accepts these lists as gospel because they come with the expert's cachet, in this case the 'shrink' who joins common cause with newspapers and magazines in sorting out our lives.

Yet I often find that they don't reflect my experience at all - and I'm someone who has had one cat run over and another put down, and been burgled twice.

I have also just moved house for the fourth time, if you exclude some moonlight flits as a student and that final farewell to the home in which I grew up or, as a young parent, lived temporarily with the in-laws.

Both burglaries were at the house the memsahib and I have just left, a semi-rural pile with a convenient getaway country lane for housebreakers.

Neither was remarkable except for the observation by a scenes-of-crime officer after the second that a re-assembled vase of flowers knocked over during the theft indicated the presence of a woman.

Under any other circumstances this might have been just a sexist male copper's casual remark, but instead it served to substitute curiosity and detachment for the violation we were supposed to have suffered.

For weeks, I meditated on the idea of someone who, in embarking on a life of crime (the perpetrators turned out to have had 'form') had not entirely dispensed with civilities.

This was despite the gang having gained entrance by the unladylike method of sledge-hammering the back door, the racket from which was interpreted innocently by our immediate neighbours as the presence of workmen.

Far from wanting to leave our pillaged home in despair, anger and fear as soon as possible, we rejoiced in a feeling of triumph, much as the occupants of a castle under attack might have celebrated seeing off a besieging army after a short-lived crossing of the moat.

The first lot of burglars levered open the front door with our own lawn-edging tool, bending it to a useless shape. It stayed with us and has moved to the new house, like the reminder of a similar victory.

In other words, the experience has armed us with a certain fortitude, which will come in useful if we are ever paid another visit by someone wanting to nick a TV, flog it for ten quid and use the money to buy a couple of sachets of the white stuff.

It was my son who had to deal with the first cat death - despatch by automobile unknown - and there were tears as we saw the second's old age terminated by a lethal injection.

Yet here again, one became almost entranced by the way the euphemism 'put to sleep' was as accurate as the minting of a coin and not, like many other roundabout ways of avoiding the truth, a deception. Administering death was a painless and merciful act, almost with the awesomeness of a rite.

We'd had 23 happy years at the house we finally sold to ease our finances and were wondering whether or not memories would get the better of our emotions on the day.

They didn't, even though they are still as vivid. All our energies were concentrated on the new place: the excitement of unfamiliar surroundings and the prospect of shaping them to our own likes and preferences.

You see, I hate to sound cold but the past has gone (though it's all we have), and the future is, well, something we can only hope will happen. The present is everything that is vital but is all of a flux.

As someone with a reverence for cats that would have made a Pharoah smile, I view the success of our latest in making himself at home as an example.

But I know something he doesn't. His future is coming at him faster than mine is at the age of 61. Ignorance is bliss - but only if you believe the experts.